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WASHINGTON — An attack on the power grid by terrorists — even ones armed with relatively simple
weapons — is among the greatest threats to the reliability of the nation’s power system, the
chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said yesterday.

“There are ways that a very few number of actors with very rudimentary equipment could take down
large portions of our grid,” Chairman Jon Wellinghoff said at a Bloomberg Government breakfast in
Washington. “I don’t think we have the level of physical security we need.”

The security of power-network components such as transformers “is an equal if not greater issue”
than cybersecurity, Wellinghoff said.

The agency two months ago created an office to help reduce risks to the electric grid and
natural-gas and oil facilities. A terrorist attack on the system could cost hundreds of billions of
dollars and result in thousands of deaths, according to a 2007 report that was declassified and
released by the National Academy of Sciences last Wednesday.

“A coordinated physical attack is very, very unsettling thing to me,” Wellinghoff said. He said
he has visited a plant where high- voltage transformers are made. “It was a very interesting and
very eye-opening experience,” he said.

Transformers, which alter the voltage of electricity, are often custom-built for utilities and
can take 18 to 36 months to make, Wellinghoff said. They are often surrounded only by chain-link
fences, he said.

An attacker “could get 200 yards away with a .22 rifle and take the whole thing out,”
Wellinghoff said. For a “couple hundred bucks” a utility could install metal sheeting to block the
view of transformers, he said. “If you can’t see through the fence, you can’t figure out where to
shoot anymore.”

The report released last week called for the government and utilities to create a stockpile of
transformers and other equipment that would be used in an emergency.